


The Usual Suspects

by thermodynamic (euphoriaspill)



Category: The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton
Genre: Domestic Violence, Gangs, M/M, Murder, Period-Typical Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-09 01:41:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18906916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/euphoriaspill/pseuds/thermodynamic
Summary: In a different life, Johnny and Ponyboy bury a body, debate moral philosophy, and confront their feelings for each other.





	The Usual Suspects

* * *

"I told you this wasn't gonna work." I swiped at my forehead with the back of my hand and cussed for a minute straight. "Who the fuck do you think you are now, Stalin?"

"Sta- _who_?"

This wasn't really Johnny's fault— between the ghetto school we got zoned into and the amount of times his old man kicked him in the head growing up, it was a goddamn miracle he'd ever learned how to read. " _Stalin_. You know, the Russian commie who was so paranoid, he hired about a million body doubles?" Fun fact, his guards were so scared shitless of disturbing him, they let him lie in a pool of his own piss for a day after he had a stroke. Unlike Johnny, I'd always read a little too much to be good for me. "Last time I let you plan nothin', I swear to God."

Johnny was either too easygoing or too weatherbeaten to protest, just let me have at it as he tried to eke out a hole from the rocky ground. "We should've tied some bricks to his arms and legs and tossed him into the Arkansas. Nobody would've ever found him."

"It's practically still summer, man, the river's near dry— he'd float back up in ten minutes." I cringed looking at him, half of his skull busted in, all broken teeth and bone fragments next to his glassy eyes. He really did resemble Johnny— the amount his mama fucked around, might've been a long-lost brother instead of a cousin, for all I knew. "Fuck, I didn't think they'd find him the second he rolled into town."

"Couldn't have happened to a nicer person, huh?" Johnny chuckled like he'd swallowed a mouthful of gravel. "At least he died doin' what he loved. Punchin' above his weight."

I cussed again as my shovel hit what felt like solid rock,  _again_ ; when I pulled it back up, I saw a misshapen dent in the metal. Fucking Lowe's. Fucking Tulsa. Fucking  _Johnny_. Not for the first time, I considered just hopping into our Trans Am and flooring it, but when your only real friend was a narrowly-escaped murderer, you got a little leery of pissing him off.

"The hell are we gonna do?" I asked; Johnny had abandoned the attempt entirely in favor of lighting a smoke. "The  _hell_ are we gonna go?"

"I mean, he's dead, ain't he? Sure, didn't happen in the chair, but at least the Socs won't be lookin' for us anymore."

"The law will be." I'd never been much of one for optimism. "Last I checked, you've still got a murder charge, buddy."

"In the second degree... might get bumped down to manslaughter if the judge already had lunch."

"Yeah, that's exactly what they call every Indian stabbin' a white boy through the chest, 'manslaughter'." (Actually, if Sheldon had just been some regular gangbanger, I doubted anyone would've bothered to sniff around and investigate— cops liked when we wiped each other out, saved them the effort— but he'd made enough financial contributions to the Tulsa PD that they'd decided to make some noise after all.)

"Who do you think you are, talkin' about white boys?" Johnny couldn't really take the piss out of me, no matter how hard he tried, but his laugh had a nasty edge like a rusted-over razorblade. "You're the one always drivin' the getaway van for a reason,  _ginger_."

"Hey, fuck you, okay, I got a tribal ID card in the dash same as you," though whenever I declared myself a proud member of the Apache nation, I mostly got the same old jokes about my mama screwing the milkman. I picked my shovel back up, tired of seeing the dead guy's mutilated face— he was making me twitch like hell. "... Are we bad people?"

Johnny was more willing to indulge my leaps into moral philosophy than most of our usual crowd, but not tonight; he wiped his hands off on his grimy t-shirt, adding dirt stains to the blood and motor oil already smeared across it. We'd definitely need to lift some new threads if we were going to make it out of here undetected. "Shit, if you don't want to get a stabbing pinned on you, don't send your wife to church wearin' a pair of Irish sunglasses." He shrugged, like it was as self-evident as one of the ten commandments, as 'snitches get stitches'. "Socs killed him a hell of a lot faster than he deserved."

Part of the reason I'd discouraged him from turning himself in was the thought of some judge sentencing him to be let loose in Nam. With enough provocation and prescription amphetamines, I swore he could make My Lai look like a tea party. "For a crime he didn't commit."

"Crime  _we_  didn't really commit, either." He was agitated, despite his dismissive tone; he'd finished one cigarette and just as quickly moved on to another, and missed the first two times he tried to strike the match. "Look, what's your deal, huh? So we blackmailed a wifebeater into takin' the heat for us— I'd say we did the world a favor. Let it go already, Pastor Ponyboy."

"And if he hadn't done anything?" The hole was shallow— animals would probably dig him up soon enough— but would cover our tracks until we got the hell out of Dodge. "If he was just some normal guy who happened to look like—"

"You're not that different from your daddy." His smile was as inviting as bared teeth. "So quit pretending your family crest's ever gonna be anything other than a gang sign."

I wanted to lay him out, but I'd learned all my first-aid in high school using him as a practice dummy, so instead I took out my frustration by flinging the body— if he hadn't already been dead, the force of that fall certainly would've broken his neck. "Maybe I'll hit up Luis, he can get us some cash," I groaned as I started dumping dirt back on top. Luis was the Santa Claus of the barrio, always paying bills for old ladies and running errands for moms with little kids — he had plenty of it to spare. I wasn't sure if I hated him because he was fucking my sister or because he strolled around the hood with his pet monkey on his shoulder, but I couldn't afford to be too proud to beg.

"Better to go to Dally. He knows how to keep his mouth shut when it's down to the wire... he always knows what to do."

Johnny worshipped Dallas Winston like he was a cross between Marlon Brando and Clint Eastwood— I couldn't stand that fucker either, to tell you the truth, though I tried to keep it to myself around him. He was the human equivalent to one of those little yappy dogs that needs to bark down the house, then pisses on your shoes for good measure, just so you know it's not gonna be kicked around. After growing up around real gangbangers my whole life, I couldn't take him any more seriously than the eighth graders who hung out at the condemned park, shooting each other with BB guns and pretending to get drunk off wine coolers.

At least, that was what I told myself.

"Better let him know you ain't really dead, you mean." I scowled, the expression my mama had worn every time my daddy came home well after midnight, stinking of some other broad's perfume and pulling his collar up to cover the hickeys on his neck. "Wouldn't want him to off himself like in Romeo and Juliet, huh?"

Johnny had never finished a book in his life, much less that book, but he wasn't dumb; he leaned against one of the surrounding trees and hooked his thumbs into his belt loops, smirked at me some. It was the most relaxed I'd ever seen him look, danger laid him out like a housewife on Valium. "Jealous?"

I pressed him up against the trunk, felt his pulse as I held two fingers to the side of his neck. His doppelgänger was next to indistinguishable from him, probably even to their own mothers, but I knew every detail of his face by now— the almost feminine moue of his lips, the light smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose and cheekbones, the gold gleam of his eyes in bright sunlight. I could identify him in the dark, by touch alone, anywhere.

"Don't start something you can't finish," he said.

As I kissed him, my thumb spread the dead man's blood across his jaw.


End file.
